Re: Another terminology question
| From: | JR <fuscian@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, May 30, 2008, 10:39 |
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on 5/30/08 6:26 AM, Carl Banks at conlang@AEROJOCKEY.COM wrote:
> JR wrote:
>> First off, I've decided to use the term 'construct' after all for the Khafos
>> suffix I asked about last month. Its usage is different from what I'm
>> familiar with from Hebrew and the like, but I've found that the term is used
>> for forms of nouns in certain African languages that occur not only with
>> possessors, but with adjectives, relative clauses, etc. I guess that gives
>> me license. Thanks to those who helped!
>
> Interesting. Bowtudgelean has a similar feature for things identified
> (not merely described) by a following adjective or adjectival phrase. I
> called it indicated state for the lack of something better (though the
> term could apply to some other definite states).
>
> Construct actually could be a good name for it; since the following
> adjective is more or less required. Except in one dialect I have them
> using a bare indicated state for weakly definite words (things where you
> want to communicate that there is a particular thing but not any sense
> of what its identity is).
I don't know if it would be appropriate there. In Khafos and these other
langs, the construct is a meaningless morphological form quite blandly
required by certain modifiers. I checked back to the earlier discussion of
B., and IIUC not only is the 'indicated' state not required when the
adjective is merely descriptive; even if an adj does identify the noun, if
there's another way to identify the noun, that could be used instead (say,
if it's past, or future). It's not required by the adj; rather it's a form
of definiteness that happens to make reference to an adj. I think the
phenomenon's pretty different, and 'indicated' might be a better name.
When you say "more or less required", what do you mean? Can you use this
state without an adjective too?
>> I have another question. Khafos uses the same marker (an infix, sometimes in
>> combination with a prefix too*; and the infix varies in the examples below
>> because it contains a copy of the previous vowel) to mark words as being
>> negative, or as being questioned, whether they're wh- words or anything
>> else. Ex:
>>
>> ha-ia-lo-m
>> leave1-X-leave2-2
>> 'You're not leaving.'
>>
>> ha-ia-lo-m? (with rising intonation)
>> leave1-X-leave2-2
>> 'Are you leaving?'
>> (This is not the equivalent of 'you're not leaving?" It's the unmarked way
>> to ask the question; 'halom?' would only be used as an echo question.)
>>
>> p-a-ia-lllo halo-n-sh
>> X-idiot1-X-idiot2 leave-Sub-3
>> 'It's not the idiot who's leaving.'
>>
>> p-a-ia-lllo halo-n-sh?
>> X-idiot1-X-idiot2 leave-Sub-3
>> 'Is the *idiot* leaving?'
>>
>> gy-iy halo-n-sh?
>> who-X leave-Sub-3
>> 'Who's leaving?'
>>
>> Is there one term I can use that covers both the interrogative and
>> negate-ive properties of this marker?
>
> Perhaps antipositive or impositive or something like that.
I thought also of 'unaffirmative', but these are all made-up, and not
actually used AFAIK. Though impositive is used sometimes for something like
a causative, i.e., something imposed.
>> * Logically there could be a separate term for this combination, as there is
>> for prefix + suffix (=circumfix), but I won't even ask.
>
> Transfix. I just guesses that might be what it would be called, but lo
> and behold the One Arbiter of Truth itself has an entry for it:
>
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfix
>
>
> Carl Banks